When I batted in Little League baseball, bunting was the last thing on my mind. I focused on slugging the ball over the outfield fence. A bunt, I thought, insulted my Louisville Slugger bat. My boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird took me to games, and watching in disappointment when I struck out, told me that I wasn’t big enough or strong enough yet to hit homeruns. “That will come someday,” he said. “Right now, get good at what you can do — become the team’s best bunter; Coach Coleman will notice, and play you more.”
A baseball lover all his life, the old black man understood the game inside and out. His strategy would have served battle commanders well: “Never abandon the fundamentals; use the mind first, the body second; avoid what is strong, attack what is weak; never doubt that doing little things well makes big things happen.” When we weren’t working in the fields on Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm, he and I were in his backyard, practicing baseball. In time, his coaching paid off. I became as good at bunting as I dreamed of being at slamming homers.
